What we have lost

What we are losing, and too-often, have already lost:

Solid, cohesive, integrated families, joined by ties of blood, heritage, and culture;

Religion (and preeminently, the Christian faith) as central and determinative for the life of that family and its members, exemplified by regular, devout, and participatory church attendance at least weekly (and undoubtedly religious instruction at home as well);

An instinctive awareness that equality does not mean identicality, embodied in knowledge of the sexes – male and female – as distinct and complementary to one another (*); and

Parenting in which both parents were a) married to one another, and consistently present in the lives of their children (**), b) participated in child-rearing, but in different and complementary ways, and c) that focused on passing down valued traditions and cultural ethos/mores to the next generation.

As I have said many times before, a tree cut off from its roots withers and dies, it does not grow and blossom and bring forth good fruit. So also with a culture and a society.


* Yes, I know there have always been a tiny minority of genuinely intersexed people, and with all the synthetic hormones and other environmental toxins floating around, that number may be growing. But you don’t base a culture off less than one-half of one percent.)

** Much is made of the fact that fathers, in earlier generations, were often absent due to long hours at work, leaving women with the task of raising children almost single-handedly. Well, true. But that absence was both qualitatively and quantitatively different than fathers who are absent because they’re “deadbeat dads,” or simply “baby daddies” who are un-involved in the lives of their children, and in some cases, may not even be known for sure to the mothers.

They were absent because they were working hard providing for the material needs of their families, and in the process, setting a good example of the importance of hard work to their children. Ideally, both parents should be able to work at jobs that allow them to spend much of their time at home with the family, as was the case for the majority of humans for the majority of history. But we do not live in those times anymore, unfortunately.

In fact, nowadays, it is often necessary for both parents to work – and not just to afford luxuries (making that assertion borders on victim-blaming, at times), but often, to afford necessities. But that is no reason to beat up on the people of the past; rather, we should use them as exemplars and role models for the direction we should be trying to steer our society.